Tenacious Playwright Is Creating His Moment

Fresh out of New York University in 2007 and anxious about his prospects as an actor, Paul Downs Colaizzo was too poor to afford therapy, so he opted for “the $12.95 version” — self-help books. He read dozens of them, absorbing mantras like “don’t take anything personally” and “be impeccable with your word,” and developing the youthful moxie that has led to his unexpected emergence as an Off Broadway playwright.

“A lot of us are secretly scared, for whatever reason, and so we get in our own way,” Mr. Colaizzo said. “But if you really want something, you have to ask for it.”

Simple, sure, but Mr. Colaizzo’s ability to combine nerve with networking — for instance cultivating a relationship with the Obie-winning director David Cromer on a sidewalk, over Facebook and at a stage door — has paid off far more than his B.F.A. has.

This month he is making his New York debut at MCC Theater as the author of the collegiate drama “Really Really,” starring Zosia Mamet (Shoshanna on the HBO’s “Girls”) and directed by Mr. Cromer, best known for an acclaimed revival of “Our Town.” Mr. Colaizzo has several more plays in his MacBook Pro and is developing scripts for television.

It is a considerable change from four years ago, when he was renting an illegal apartment and collecting unemployment. Such relentless determination is what Mr. Colaizzo examines with ferocity in “Really Really.”

While the plot focuses on a brutal sexual allegation and its consequences for several friends, the play more broadly considers the morality of college students in the aftermath of the Great Recession. As one of the female students, Grace, tells a conference of fellow future leaders, their “secret weapon” is tenacity. “In any situation,” she says, “what can I do to get what I want?”

“Really Really” may well divide and even disturb some audience members. But Mr. Colaizzo’s inspirations for the play were relatively benign, like a friend’s refusal to help him carry bags of clothes because doing the favor wasn’t in the friend’s self-interest. He was also gripped by the ambiguities surrounding an overly friendly priest in John Patrick Shanley’s play “Doubt,” as well as by books about “Generation Me” Americans.

Mr. Colaizzo hardly comes across as ruthless as his characters, not with his toothy grin and open face, his years as a drum major and an admirer of “Grease 2.” (“He’s a total geek,” Mr. Cromer said.) But he undoubtedly shares some of their drive in his pursuit of playwriting, a field where few 27-year-olds make the splash Off Broadway that he is.

“Going on unemployment was a total low point for me, but it was also the point when I promised myself I’d write every day from 9 to 5,” he said, sitting on the only couch in the boxy apartment he shares with two roommates on the Upper West Side. “I tried to make the most out of every situation that came along.”

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Zosia Mamet, left, and Lauren Culpepper in Paul Downs Colaizzo’s play “Really, Really” at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

He learned to do so in childhood, as his parents moved through four states by the time he was 11 because of his father’s job with U.P.S. He adjusted to new schools by strictly following rules, preferring to sit next to the other quiet kids, and he dove into acting lessons wherever he found them. He also had an entrepreneurial spirit: One Easter he asked for a water cooler as a gift because he wanted to be a businessman, and by high school he was designing Web sites for companies around Alpharetta, Ga., where his family finally settled.

After college he wrote the first draft of “Really Really” in the back of a passenger van while traveling the East Coast in a touring production of “Great Expectations.” And as an assistant company manager on the Broadway musical “Xanadu” he met its book writer, Douglas Carter Beane — an acquaintanceship that led to their collaboration on the “Cubby Bernstein” Web series (a spoof of the Tony Awards campaign season) and again on the musical “Sister Act.” Mr. Beane hired Mr. Colaizzo as his typist but eventually gave him a writing credit for churning out countless one-liners like “puttin’ the sis back in Genesis.”

“He’s a quick, instinctual writer who knows the way people talk, which you can’t teach,” said Mr. Beane, who has become a popular mentor for aspiring writers. “I wouldn’t have thought that someone who can write a real old-school joke like Paul could also write something like Neil LaBute on a bad day.”

Mr. Colaizzo’s networking also included sending an e-mail, cold, to the theater marketing firm Spotco and landing a four-month job, and later — crucially — asking friends at the Olney Theater Center in Maryland (where he had performed as Perchik in “Fiddler on the Roof”) to sponsor “Really Really” in a Washington play-reading festival.

The Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., ended up producing the premiere of “Really Really” last winter, and the reviews in The Washington Post and elsewhere were so strong that two New York producers reached out to Mr. Colaizzo about mounting the play on Broadway. He declined to go into the details but said he opted to have the play produced Off Broadway with an eye toward his long-term career interests.

“I’ve spent time learning different parts of the industry, and I want to be working in this industry for a while,” Mr. Colaizzo said. “To me MCC Theater is the right place right now for this play.”

MCC chose to produce it because of its provocative nature and potential to ignite conversation and debate, according to one of its artistic directors, Bernard Telsey. (The play is in previews at the Lucille Lortel Theater and is scheduled to open on Tuesday.) Mr. Cromer too said he wanted to direct the play because of “its unwillingness to settle on easy answers to the situation.”

“As I started reading it I assumed that I was supposed to side with a certain character, or decide who was right and who was wrong,” Mr. Cromer said. “I found myself agreeing and then disagreeing with the same character, and that was exciting.”

The two men became friends four years ago, early in the run of “Our Town,” after Mr. Colaizzo spotted Mr. Cromer on the Upper West Side and shouted his name, and then went into detail praising the production. Later, via Facebook, he asked Mr. Cromer to read another of his plays, “Little Gives,” then brought it downtown to the stage door of the “Our Town” theater.

Now they have an easy rapport. Batting around ideas in the rehearsal room for “Really Really” this winter Mr. Colaizzo wrote a couple of new lines of dialogue on the fly when Mr. Cromer found an exchange too vague.

“I was afraid going into this that I would turn meek around David in the rehearsal room,” Mr. Colaizzo said, “so I set a ground rule at the start: that I would never get him lunch, even when I was going out to get my own lunch, because I didn’t want to feel like an assistant. David is a hero of mine, like Doug is, but I’ve also now become an artist in my own right.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Tenacious Playwright Is Creating His Moment. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe